Average Engagement Time is a user-centric metric in Google Analytics 4 that measures the average amount of time individual users spend actively engaged with your website or app. Unlike traditional session-based metrics, this focuses on user behaviour across all their interactions, providing a more holistic view of how deeply users connect with your content. The metric only counts time when users are genuinely engaged, defined as sessions lasting 10 seconds or longer, containing conversion events, or having multiple page/screen views. This metric represents a significant shift from Universal Analytics' session-duration approach, offering a more accurate picture of meaningful user interaction by filtering out brief, low-quality visits that don't represent genuine engagement.

A crawl budget refers to the number of page bots from Google crawl and index on a website within a given timeframe. It affects how often and how many of your pages are indexed by Google. For example, if your website has a large number of pages but only a portion of them are indexed, it may indicate that your budget is being allocated inefficiently. This means that Googlebot is not spending enough time crawling and indexing important pages on your website, which could impact your search engine visibility. Another key aspect of this budget optimization is monitoring your website's log files to track how search engine bots are crawling your site. This data can provide valuable insights into crawl patterns, potential issues, and areas for improvement. When you understand and manage your crawl budget, you boost the chances of showing your content to your target audience.

Domain Authority is a score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). DA is not an authority metric used by Google in determining search rankings but, instead, a third-party tool used for benchmarking and competitive link analysis. It is also a relative measure, meaning that it is most useful when comparing one domain's authority to another rather than as an absolute score of a website's traffic and performance.

Keyword difficulty is an SEO metric that predicts the effort required to rank on the first page of search engine results for a specific keyword. This metric is crucial for anyone involved in SEO as it influences the strategic direction of content plans and marketing campaigns—the higher the keyword "difficulty," the more challenging it is to rank for that keyword.

Keyword ranking refers to the position of a website or webpage in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for a specific keyword or search term. It measures how well a website or webpage ranks compared to its competitors when someone searches for a particular keyword. When a website ranks higher in the search results, it's more likely to be seen by users. This can lead to increased organic traffic and visibility. That’s why businesses should pay attention to their keyword rank and strive to improve them.

Organic Search is the measure of visits to a website that come from naturally generated search engine results. These results are not influenced by any paid search activity and are driven purely by Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts.

Percent New Users gives the percentage of new users that visit a website out of the total number of users that have visited the website. By tracking the percentage of new users, you can better understand the behavioural patterns of your audience, including how likely they are to return to your website.

Reach is an Alexa Web Search metric that measures the number of people who have the Alexa toolbar or extension installed and who saw your content. If your website has a Reach score of 5,000, this means that 5,000 people out of a sample of 1 million, who have the toolbar or extension installed, saw your site yesterday.

A Session, also known as a Website Visit, represents a group of user interactions with your website that occur within a given timeframe. Google Analytics defines a session as a period of continuous user engagement that begins when a user arrives on your site and ends when they leave or after 30 minutes of inactivity. Each session can contain multiple activities including page views, events, downloads, form submissions, and e-commerce transactions. Sessions are fundamental to understanding user behaviour patterns and website performance, as they capture the complete journey a user takes during a single visit to your site.

User Engagement is a foundational GA4 metric that measures the total time your website or app was in the foreground of users' devices during a specified date range. This metric captures the aggregate engagement time across all users and sessions, providing a comprehensive view of total user attention your digital property receives. Unlike user-averaged metrics, User Engagement represents the raw sum of all engagement duration, making it particularly valuable for understanding overall content consumption and audience reach. The metric only counts time when your site or app is actively in the foreground and meets GA4's engagement criteria (sessions lasting 10+ seconds, containing conversion events, or having multiple page/screen views), ensuring the measurement reflects genuine user attention rather than passive or accidental visits.

Users represents the count of unique individuals who have visited your website during a specified time period, encompassing both new and returning visitors. In Google Analytics 4 (GA4), this metric is tracked through client IDs that are automatically assigned to each unique visitor upon their first visit to your site. This identifier allows the platform to distinguish between different individuals and prevents double-counting when the same person visits multiple times within the measurement period.

Website Bounce Rate measures the percentage of website sessions that are single-page sessions. A single-page session is when a user exits a website after interacting with a single page only. Interactions, also called Engagement Hits or interaction events by Google Analytics, can include: page views, social shares, e-commerce transactions, CTA interactions, and more.